Why we can’t talk about Arthur Rimbaud.
Arthur Rimbaud is one of the most important French poets who have ever lived. And yet, not only is he to this day way less known than his precursor Charles Baudelaire, but it seems that he is also not spoken about with the same respect that is afforded to other great poets. Why is that so? I individuated a very important reason: Adultism. This form of discrimination, which is experienced by all children in a patriarchal society, has affected Rimbaud not only while he was alive, but it keeps affecting him now. I was inspired to write this article by a recent biography I’ve read about him. The author of the biography kept referring to “Rimbaud” as “Arthur”, while even his father was referred to by the biographer with his title. I asked myself: “Do we do this with other poets?”, the answer was, no. Reflecting on it, there are many things we call Rimbaud that we never call other poets. One of these is the word “brat”. Potrayals of him in popular culture reflect this view of him, the 1995 film “Total Eclipse” while trying to be historically accurate, gives a terrible image of him. What in other (male) poets are seen as qualities, in him they’re seen as defects, this reflects the broader view of children in society, what is being a “boss” for a (male) adult is Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) in a child. As Szasz wrote, ODD is not an actual illness, it’s “simply behavior that upsets the adults who have legal authority and power to define and control [a child]” (this also presents a racialized angle, with a white boy more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and a black boy with ODD for presenting the same behavior). If Arthur Rimbaud had lived today, where adult control over children is even more strictly enforced than in nineteenth century France, he would have certainly not had the possibility of writing his greatest poems, and even at the time, some people believed it would have been best to institutionalize him. Lepelletier believed he should have been put in a reformatory. Many people have tried to “explain” (another thing that is never done with other important poets) his behavior, but no one until now has mentioned his desire for freedom and recognition of his talent in a deeply hostile society. As Enid Starkie, a profoundly adultist biographer for that matter, has written: “From his earliest years he had been told again and again that he was no one, only a child who must do what he was bid, and that others knew better than he what was good for him. He had never been allowed any pocket-money; he had never possessed the means of cultivating, even simply and modestly, his personal tastes, and to develop his personality; he had been reduced to illicit borrowing of books from book stalls, to satisfy his craving for reading. There was nothing which was veritably his own, not even privacy - except what he could find in the open air when he stole away to the woods. Now all that was over. Now, all at once this humiliating condition — doubly humiliating to a youth of Rimbaud’s pride — came to an end”. This is how it was, and still is, for a vast majority of children. In the words of John Lennon, “ as soon as you’re born they make you feel small”. That he was “proud” is remarked, as if what in a man is considered natural, was exceptional in a boy, who isn’t considered “fully” human. The departure of his father at the age of six is often considered what “caused him to be like that”, in this patriarchal way of viewing things, the strong male head of the family should have kept the women and children in their place. Not just Rimbaud’s behavior, but also the stern discipline of his mother are seen as the results of his absence. His mother’s actions are not considered acts of adultist oppression, but a release of the frustrations of a woman who, because she is a woman, needs a man to control her. Rimbaud’s condemnations of the institution of the family are read simply as having been a way for him to express his desire to have had a stable one, of course, children hardly mean what they say. This ideology recalls the one used to discriminate against single mothers, “boys need male role models”. When asked why, the people who say this reply “It’s obvious! How will they learn to be men otherwise?”. Why is to so important to be “men”? And what does it mean to be a “man”? Clearly what it means in their minds is not simply “sexually mature male”. It means someone who embodies the traits our society commonly associates with “masculinity”, someone who has violently suppressed the boy he used to be. Rimbaud throughout his life has refuted aetonormative narratives of “growing up”: “When he became a man he had nothing further to say”. When talking about Rimbaud, we talk of the “great boy” he was, not of the great man he became. His adulthood is a nebolous period of his life on which very few things are known except that he abandoned poetry and most of his ideals to become an arms dealer (and according to some, with very few proofs to confirm it, a slave dealer) in Africa, this is a unique case. Running contrary to the stereotype of what “adolescence” and “adulthood” should be, we remain amazed by his life as a boy and ashamed of his life as a man. Because his greatness is impossible to deny, adults have found several different strategies to exorcise the fear he keeps instilling in them.
When Arthur Rimbaud became a man: Rendering age invisible.
Fowlie writes that Rimbaud “was a child expressing himself in the language of a man”. I disagree. That Rimbaud is expressing himself “in the language of a man” could be agreed on only by people who believe children cannot write well. Or that they cannot talk about sex and violence, after all, those are the two topics that mark something as being for “adults only”, as if sex and violence were absent from the life of children. Those are the vast majority of people. But at least in that line his age is recognized, very often, it is rendered invisible. It is dangerous for it to be otherwise. If a teacher was to stress to their students his age, they might believe they could also be capable of great things, and we cannot allow that. Of course an adult understands he was an “exception”, really an unique case, but these kids, they could get strange ideas…
Thomas Chatterton too, might have been a boy, but he had “manly” ways, and died soon, like children who are too clever are bound to, “gifted” children might have “brains of geniuses”, but as Montour (1976) reminds us, “emotions of boys” (The stereotype of rational men and emotional boys was also disrupted by Rimbaud, as he was a “rational boy” companion to an “emotional man”, Verlaine. Despite this, many representations of Rimbaud still show him as a deeply impulsive, the cliché of the “hormonal” teen).
Age was not invisible in his life, but it is now in the criticism of his work. How his subjective experiences of being a boy reflect through his poems is not a topic that is frequently broached, even though children and childhood, as well as distinctively youthful experiences, constantly appear. This is a serious gap in literary criticism of Rimbaud. Everything he wrote is always analyzed as if a man wrote it. We lose a lot by refusing to look deeper in the effect his age had on his writings.
Our society is so violently adultist that ridiculing a young person who “thinks they understand Rimbaud” is frequent. “You’re too young to comprehend such complex works”, a reply like “He was my age when he wrote them” would get you labelled, like he sometimes is, “a brat”. Being a child and understanding, let alone writing great poems are two things that contradict each other is people’s minds, it is no mystery why we find it so difficult to talk about Rimbaud.
The strategy of rendering age invisible allows adults to recognize Rimbaud’s greatness while simoultaneously to keep undermining all the children in their lives and ridicule their art were they to make it, if they force them to give a passing recognition to his “precocity” (itself an adultist concept, good despite being a child, “like an adult”) “you’re not Rimbaud” is the prompt answer. Or at the very least absolves them for the guilt of continuously reenforcing social structures that render it impossible for children to express themselves freely.
But there also cases where adults fully recognize Rimbaud’s age, and not in a way that uplifts youth.
Garçon fatale: Rimbaud as destroyer.
There are two dominant views concerning children: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian approach is the understanding of children as innocent, pure, uncorrupted creatures whose virtues can reedem a lost, brutal adult world, while the Dionysian approach is the understanding of them as “little devils”, inherently evil and disruptive creatures that, left to themselves, generate chaos. To further simplify this concept I’ll mention two extremely famous books: “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy reflects the Apollonian approach and “Lord Of The Flies” by William Golding reflects the Dionysian approach. Both of these two ways of looking at children are oppressive adultist stereotypes, and oppress children in a similar way to how the “Madonna/Whore” dualism oppresses women. For obvious reasons, teenage children like Rimbaud are more likely to be identified with the Dionysian and prepubescent children with the Apollonian. Adolescence is seen as a period where children should still be subordinated, but rebellion is to be expected. Meaning that they should be subjected to even more authoritarianism. Rimbaud is sometimes potrayed as a poet who despite being a child wrote adult things and whom kids can’t understand as we’ve seen, but that’s not the only view. There are also those who recognize him as an icon of “teenage rebellion”, that adults “grow out of”. Most people imagine “teenage rebels” as spoiled pretty white boys who soon “grow out of it”, recognize the silliness of their previous behavior, and grow up to be righteous white men. In a way, this seems to fit Rimbaud. But I refuse to view “teenage rebellion” as something silly. It’s frequency is not “natural”, it reflects the deep dissatisfaction children experience in a society that doesn’t regard them as people. But promulgating the lie that “teenage rebellion” is natural occurrence caused by “hormones” means legitimizing the unjustified exclusion of teenagers from several aspects of society on the basis that they are “wired” to destroy.
Rimbaud is represented that way especially when it comes to discuss his relationship with Verlaine. That he wrecked him and his family is an observation that is made by most of the people who know who Rimbaud and Verlaine are. But is incorrect. Verlaine had a mind of his own, despite his claims of being “bewitched” and “hypnotized” by this “satan adolescent”. The trope of a beautiful boy leading a man to ruin is not rare, it is actually pretty common, from “Death In Venice” to Pasolini’s tragic end in Ostia. This places all the responsibility for a relationship that was mutually violent on Rimbaud (whom we shouldn’t forget, Verlaine tried to kill once, even if Rimbaud had physically hurt him in different occasions, this should automatically render him unfit for the role of victim). Some also place all of the responsibility of Verlaine’s mistreatment of his wife Mathilde, also a teenage child, on him, as if Verlaine didn’t batter her before his meeting with him, as if a physically abusive relationship between an husband and a sixteen year old wife could be fixed, as if even when he knew Rimbaud it still wasn’t his conscious decision to beat her (alcohol does not necessarily cause violence).
The message is, if Verlaine had not placed his trust on a juvenile who claimed to be a great poet, because we know teens can’t be trusted, their impulse is to destroy, he could have retained his patriarchal domain: his wife, his son and his “most precious and most pernicious source of pride”, essentially, this is the portrayal of Rimbaud as a castrator, similar to J.M Barrie’s “Peter Pan”.
“Mon triste coeur bave à la poupe”: Rimbaud viewed sexually.
While reading the same biography mentioned at the beginning of the article, I was also struck by this description the author makes of him: “Tender, naked, defenseless”. I thought that if I didn’t write about this topic no one will ever do it. When I reflect on this topic, Fantin-Latour’s portrayal of him is what first comes to my mind. His physical difference from all the others who are seated next to him is the first thing one notices when looking at that painting. The difference between adults and children, including teenage children who have not completed their sexual maturation (who still do not possess most “secondary sexual characteristics”), particularly between men and boys, is not unlike that between men and women, in a sense, it is sexual difference. The New Inquiry describes him in that painting like this: “He wears a dandy’s cravat and a shabby suit. His expression — with its insolent pout and vacant, sociopathic stare — cannot obscure the feminine delicacy of his nose and the soft curve of his boyish cheeks”. That he could not obscure that was something Rimbaud was constantly reminded of during his life too (today he constantly is by the descriptions of biographers and the like as we’ve just seen), but he had took away the power to the adults around him of rendering it a disadvantage for him. His sexuality, always exhibited openly, had become a way for him to dominate the adults around him, if anything. The stories he made up about himself and allowed to circulate constructed an elaborate sexual mythology around him, which contributes to the scandalous reputation that he still has today and that still helps to draw attention to him (Cabaner’s milk would be one example). He knew the importance physical looks would have had on his reputation, because he was a boy. He was proved right. The Carajat photograph is still iconic. He also knew that it was better not to prove Lepelletier’s “Le poète saturnien Paul Verlaine donnait le bras à une charmante personne, Mademoiselle Rimbaud” wrong in public, having people suppose that Verlaine was, in his own words, “an old cunt”, might have been too much. He was proved right in this too, traditional pederastic relationships always involved the boy as the “passive partner”, the reverse always seemed and still does seem unthinkable. Hence the disgust of spectators at that scene in “Total Eclipse” where they “did not expect Rimbaud to top”. Such a free sexuality displayed by someone who in many states in America would not have been allowed to have sex in the first place warrants a punishment. This is why Starkie, from his poem that he himself declared meant nothing, “The Stolen Heart”, concludes that he was gleefully raped by Communard soldiers (and that he had no previous sexual experiences, hard to believe considering some of his poems from that period), punishing an unruly child and slandering the Paris Commune with one simple baseless assumption. There would also be a lot to say about the fact that she thinks it is possible to “enjoy” a rape, regardless of the time period in which her biography first appeared. For Kerouac it’s a different story:
“Rimbaud nonplussed Rimbaud
trains in the green National
Guard, proud marching
in the dust with his heroes — -
hoping to be buggered”
What else can a child do during a revolution?
Ps. I’m not saying that it is impossible that Rimbaud was ever raped (after all he admitted a sexual assault was attempted on him in prison), he was a child who spent plenty of time on the road alone, in nineteenth century France, where if we consider taboos surrounding sexuality which rendered it difficult for girls let alone boys (involved in one third of criminal trials) to disclose sexual assaults we have to observe that most likely what reached the courts represented a tiny fraction which means that the records paint a terrifying picture, simply that the situation described by Starkie is very unlikely.
Conclusion.
This article does not nearly begin to cover the ways adultism influences the way we talk about Rimbaud. Those issues were simply the ones that came to my mind during my last reading of a biography about him (a biography written in Italian by an Italian author, so probably unknown to most of his anglophone admirers), which prompted a broader reflection on the ways he is discussed that differ from other poets because of his age when he wrote his most important works. About adultism and its place in both the way Rimbaud is generally discussed as well as in the bibliography devoted to his life and works at least a short book could be written, looking at the issue from his caricature in “Les Hommes d’aujourd’hui” to present day. I sincerely hope that when the problem of discrimination against children (a term I used throughout the article to refer to adolescents as well, as they have roughly the same legal rights as prepubescent children) will be written about more extensively something like that will be published.
